Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Second death of Chinua Achebe

From the crumbling infrastructure of the news industry comes
a transmission to make you doubt. Casts shadows on friendships and things you
held dear. How were you wrong all these years? How did you not know?

I could buy groceries today but a plane went down. I saw a
tiny plane alone in the sky when I went out in the backyard. Was this the day
that the cherry blossoms were drifting down like floral snow? Or was I getting
ahead of myself. I read about the plane and imagined that last minute for each
person on board. The vastness of the sky letting them go, returning them to
earth in the cruelest way possible.Was that plane I saw a ghost? A signal from
beyond. But why would I be worthy of this symbol? I was unconnected to this
plane except for the pain I felt at this remote witnessing. It should pain me
no more than the collapse of Yemen. But,Yemen gave no ghost. Or no ghost I
recognized. Maybe all the tragedies of the world give out ghosts for us to see.
It is up to us to properly witness. To recognize the ghosts offered us. But the
onslaught of distant news in many ways already is a ghost. Like those stars
whose light peppers the dome of the night, we are seeing light from something
already dead.

Like the second death of Chinau Achebe. An outpouring on the
internet for a man most probably hadn’t even read. Not that I have really read
him, read many authors influenced by him. Read one of his essays once and
didn’t really care for his conclusions. Things fall apart the title of his most
famous work is a great title, a good thought as we think of our society as an
eternal monolith, an unending reality with no conclusions, no cracks in it. Of
course we see some cracks in it. California has less than a year of water left.
The entire dream of California could end in abandoned cities. We can’t really
picture an end that isn’t disaster or understand any other way of living, for
we for are in a total system, one that respects no other reality, or this
reality even. Death rumours start in the ecosystem of this echo chamber,
sharing without reading, without researching. A minute visit to wikipedia would
confirm when the author died. I was suspicious when I saw it appear in my feed.
Saddened at his death but with a nagging feeling that I had experienced this
before, felt this moment, felt this sadness. Obviously there is too much
information to process on any level, we feel this urge to react. We need to be
seen as the carrier of this dead famous person’s legacy. it’s the selling of
our personal brand, to be seen as someone who works to preserve these brief
moments of intelligence in the world. Not the worst thing to be a private
unpaid entrepreneur for. Advertising has leaked in and consumed everything.

How many times can you die before you fade away? When does
your archived information work through the system and stop appearing. A friend
of mine who died almost a year ago still has a profile up. People keep tagging
themselves in her photos and she reappears. Or her name appears when I’m
tagging someone else in a post. We know her, we know she is gone, we know the
date. She isn’t a celebrity that vast amount of people respect but barely know,
her death won’t be widely reported again. She isn’t one of the idols or icons
unknown and removed from context, ripe for appropriation. I had watched a
comedy special where the comedian showed Ghandi being used to sell Apple and
Che Guevara to sell Mercedes. Icons removed from any reality and the hope
being we get that aura of their power without thinking too deeply. Just click,
forward, put a thought down and move on, never looking back. Never turning to a
pillar of salt.

All month I’ve taken photos of clouds. Masses of water
vapour crafted into magnificent and odd shapes bunched up and pulled taffy like
across the sky, caught in the shimmering light. That is why I caught that plane
crossing in front of an immense darkened cloud, a cloud too dense with water to
be permeated by light. I took the shot and felt it represented the fragility of
humanity’s technology and vanity in front of the awesome face of nature.Later
that morning, the news of Germanwings tragedy started appearing.150 lives wiped
out by the collision between technology, vanity, and nature. As usual my mind
jumps to connection, relying on pattern recognition, that age old human trait
that pulled us through the dark ages on our way to birthing this vast networked
society. I see the plane I photographed, I hear of the plane hitting the
mountain. I connect the two. I see a ghost, a warning of the event. Like the
legendary black dog that foretells a death in the family.

Then, a week later it appears again in the feed. A sad day
in music someone proclaims, Captain Beefheart is dead. I know instantly that
Beefheart has been dead for almost five years. He fits into a category like
Achebe, of an artist who is respected and admired for his work and vast
influence on other musicians but seldom listened to. People want to be seen as
an admirer of his work without listening to him or even doing the minimal
research to find out if he is alive or not. I stumbled upon his masterpiece
“Trout Mask Replica” back in high school, that mystic period where our
personalities and idea of the world are being formed through the flawed
receptors for stimuli that we are gifted with, battered by the winds of
hormones, pressure of peers, and our ignorance as we stumble in that dark
searching for purpose and meaning. I hated this record as many did at first (or
remained hating), couldn’t find its bizarre rhythms and harsh sound as even
music. Slowly and obsessively I learned its language, deciding long ago that
it’s a marvelous piece of twentieth century art.

Many find that century’s legacy in danger in this age, The
age of distraction. The age of ghosts. The age of multiple deaths and
appearances.

In an hour I saw them appear. Multiple new sources reporting
that Joni Mitchell was unresponsive in a coma. I forward a link to it myself.
Checking her official website showed that this was false. The stories gradually
disappeared. By the next morning the last of the crossposts had stopped, been
corrected or deleted. These events are like weather clogging our dreams. The
ghost continue, the dead walking with the living who are living hazy
recollection of what life should be.

The weather had been warm and brightly sunny, a late spring
early summer feel. Barbeque was in the air, and lawnmowers running. Sickly
clouds of insects hovering over the grass. The weather brought a calm, but also
a greedy expectation of movement, to be out and mixing with the world. The
weather had a dark undercurrent, were was the rain? The snowpack was already
dangerously low in Oregon and with looming water disaster in California these
thoughts kept popping up. A week after the plane was the morning of the cherry
petals. A wet dashing rain, wind blown with lost little drops. The petals
falling down scattered in their ends on the patio. The air was cooler, like
actual spring. a possibility of a clean rebirth.